The Right Recipes for Breaking the Rules 🧨
Welcome to Secret Breakfast / The best place to start bending spoons, freezing jams, having breakfast-for-dinner, and dessert-for-starter
Hi there! Today, I have a - FICTIONAL - story for you.
I was sitting at my usual table in the trattoria when a lawyer in a designer suit materialized before me.
«I represent Jimmy Donaldson», he whispered, glancing around like we were in some spy thriller. The name rang a bell.
«MrBeast wants to expand his empire into food publishing and needs someone to teach him the art of culinary newsletters». He told me how YouTube's king, with his 390 million followers, after selling everything from burgers to $65 chocolate bars, was now seeking new territories to conquer.
The negotiation fizzled when I revealed my business model: writing purely for reader satisfaction.
The lawyer nearly choked on his Cynar Negroni (★recipe).
«No profit margins?».
Two weeks later, I discovered from the news that MrBeast had signed an eight-figure deal with HarperCollins for a thriller with James Patterson. Meanwhile, I'm still here crafting newsletters about the perfect carbonara technique while he's creating fictional billion-dollar death competitions.
Different paths, I suppose.
Piero
✹The Matrix, 1999. The 3:00 clip is here.
Closed for Pandemic
If you're an OLD Secret Breakfast reader, you know this story. Photographer John Carey captured over 180 chefs in a striking black-and-white series showing the impact of the national lockdown on the UK’s restaurant industry. Released on March 20th—five years after the pandemic closures—the book features chefs from rising talents to legends like Angela Hartnett and Raymond Blanc, photographed in their shuttered spaces as Carey found them. With reflections from icons like Jamie Oliver and Gordon Ramsay, the project is a powerful tribute to a moment that paused an entire industry. Unfortunately is UK delivery only.
Chefs in Lockdown: A Photographic Portrait Series by John Carey
→ Shortplot: 🔪 🧑🏻🍳 🎞️ 😷
⭕️John Carey is one of the 23 food personalities I interviewed for the first Secret Breakfast book in 2023. You can always grab a digital copy, it's free, it's here. ⭕️
Use your illusion
Some recipes don’t just surprise you—they break the rules of the kitchen. They challenge everything you think you know about cooking. Sugar that isn’t sweet the way you expect. Jam that never sees heat. Desserts that start the meal, or mains that come out of the freezer.
These are the culinary equivalents of bending the spoon (🕶️)—dishes that remind us that the limits we think are there often... aren’t. That the line between savory and sweet, cooked and raw, starter and dessert, is far blurrier than it seems.
How many recipes do you know that feel like plot twists? They're familiar in flavor, but strange in logic—upside-down, inside-out, sometimes even backwards.
Here's a taste.
🍬Invert Sugar (★recipe)
Dive into the chemistry angle: this isn’t metaphorical but literal inversion. Use it in a recipe like a sorbet, or cookies, or chewy caramel to show how science flips expectations—smoother texture, longer shelf life.
❄️Freezer Jam (★recipe)
Jam that’s not cooked. Spotlight it as a summer recipe that tastes fresher, uses less sugar, and defies the whole idea of jam as a shelf-stable pantry item.
🫑Inside-out Stuffed Peppers (★recipe)
Take all the ingredients of a stuffed pepper—ground meat, rice, tomato—but blend them into a filling and use roasted pepper strips as a garnish or a puree underneath. The pepper’s not the vessel anymore—it's the condiment.
🥫Cold Soup, Hot Salad
We expect soup to comfort us warm, and salad to cool us down. Flip it. Gazpacho or cold cantaloupe soup (★recipe) can startle with their chill. Meanwhile, try a wilted greens salad with warm vinaigrette and bacon fat (★recipe)—it eats like a main course (or don't, if your bloodwork is like mine!).
⤵️Upside-Down Cake… Savory Edition
Borrow the concept from pineapple upside-down cake (★recipe), but make it with caramelized onions, roasted tomatoes, and polenta batter. Serve with crème fraîche or goat cheese. A side dish that thinks it’s dessert.
🌓Breakfast-for-Dinner / Dessert-for-Starter
Savory granola with yogurt and pickled veg (★recipe). Chocolate mousse with chili and herbs as amuse-bouche (★recipe). Play with temporal inversion—serving foods "out of order" in the meal timeline.
Basically an Instagram dump today
🍩Krispy Kreme is joining forces with Pac-Man 🐂But I'm More an Oxtail Donuts Regular Guy (★recipe) 🍏Must Read: 25 Years of N.Y.C. Dining 🍋 In the “A Song of Ice and Fire” book series George R.R Martin devotes a lot of ink to lemon cakes, a favorite of the Lady of Winterfell Sansa Stark (★recipe) 🍓Pavlova Muffins (★recipe) 🥒This One is Super: Creamy Cucumber Avocado Broccoli Salad (★recipe) 🥔Parmesan-Infused Mashed Potatoes with Crispy Parmesan Crust (★recipe) 🐟A Fancy Fishcake (★recipe) ☕️Yes, Coffee Shops Are Tired of Remote Workers (plus, you're not cool anymore if you work from the bar)
The Paradox of the Restaurant Cookbook
Siobhan Phillips / Vittles
Restaurant cookbooks promise home cooks access to professional magic, yet often offer recipes too complex or impractical for domestic kitchens. Siobhan Phillips unpacks this contradiction, revealing how these books are as much about aspiration and branding as actual cooking.
The Airplane ‘Barf Bag’ Is A Genius Invention Most People Never Think About, And Using One Blew My Mind
Mercedes Streeter / The Autopian
The humble air sickness bag—rarely noticed, hilariously awkward in use—became an unlikely hero when the author experienced sudden nausea mid-flight. What follows is a mix of personal embarrassment, unexpected gratitude, and a deep dive into the surprisingly clever design and quirky history of one of aviation’s most overlooked innovations.
